SANAA Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa, Tokyo
The young Japanese architectural office SANAA of architect Kazuyo Sejima and her partner Ryue Nishizawa will present six projects in Berlin. Kazuyo Sejima worked for Toyo Ito - before opening her own office in Tokyo in 1987 - and in 1995 entered into a design partnership with Ryue Nishizawa under the name SANAA. Both continue to work under their own names.
The exhibition presents two individual projects and two joint projects, including the Municipal Theatre in Almere, the Netherlands, her first project outside Japan. All their buildings are characterised by a delicate transparency and a clear formal language, which connect and at the same time separate the exterior from the interior, thus enhancing the contrast with the surrounding nature. Even if the generous use of glass, as in Ryue Nishizawa's Weekendhouse, takes place inside the house through three atria, it is not only about the incident daylight and ventilation, but also about reflections in the glass walls and ceilings that reflect the light green of the Japanese landscape. With the Contemporary Art Museum in Kanazawa, Japan, they pursued the idea of creating a kind of park landscape through the museum, which would enable visitors to experience a completely new, open approach to the city through a variety of different routes, both inside and outside. In the middle of a city that is both historically significant and at the same time rapidly expanding, they set a geometric structure, a circle, which they fill with partly transparent cubes. For them, the geometry of the circle is a sign of a strict and independent form, which does not attribute a fixed front and back to the museum.
The presented projects are:
H-Building, Tokyo (office building)
Small House, Tokyo
Weekendhouse, Usui, Japan
Private House, Kamakura, Japan
Contemporary Art Museum, Kanazawa, Japan
City Theatre, Almere, The Netherlands
Project management: Ulla Giesler
